Hi Michael,
Thanks for your feedback.
The functionality to overwrite source layers with existing view layers is something that was purposefully designed to prevent data publishers from potentially corrupting existing services and their related views. The overwrite function allows you to completely change the data structure and data with a simple action, for this reason we have some logic to prevent this in certain cases. Overwrite removes all of the data and publishes new data (objectIds, globalIDs, field changes, layer changes, etc.) to the same service name with the same item ID. As there is a complete change of data and potentially schema protections were put in place to ensure it wouldn't be possible to potentially affect dependent layers.
The same concept applies to feature layers with sync enabled. If a layer is published and a user of the layer creates an offline copy, overwriting the data will remove all of the existing data and add new data, making it impossible to synchronize the data. For these reasons, we block the ability to overwrite such layers from ArcGIS Pro.
There are some scenarios in which we could look into how to address this, such as if the schema is not changing, etc. Logging your specific use case on ideas helps the product team to understand the specific workflow that you are trying to accomplish. The votes and comments on Ideas are incredibly helpful to the product team as it gives us the birds eye view of issues that are affecting are users and in many cases insight into specific workflows. Supporting an idea also allows the product team to understand who this idea is important to. If an idea has support and we begin the design phase of a related project, we instantly have a pool of customers to contact and clarify use cases. Receiving votes on an idea helps us to prioritize issues that are affecting many people, but the content and access to our customers who are actively providing feedback through ideas is invaluable.
That being said, ideas and geonet are not the only way that we collect feedback for products at Esri, so if there is a topic or specific workflow that you want to discuss with us, there are a few options to get in contact. If you are attending a conference, please come by the ArcGIS Online area and talk to us about the specific issue. If you aren't attending any conferences and want to have a product conversation, get in contact with your account team and request to provide feedback to the product team (if it's ArcGIS Online, feel free to send me a message directly). If you are running into a bug or have something that you want to track, get in contact with support. Both bugs and enhancements are track-able and log-able through a support case: https://support.esri.com/en/contact-tech-support
If you are looking for an informal conversation or discussion with others who may run into similar issues, I recommend submitting ideas or starting a conversation on Geonet, just like you did here.
Nathan Frazer, if you are looking to update your existing source data, try taking a look at the append workflow. I think this will accomplish what you need:
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/data-management/whats-new-with-hosted-featur...
Please let us know if you would like to connect to discuss your specific use cases so that we can find out more about how we can help keep your data up to date, without potentially affecting related views.
-Kelly
